DEVELOPMENT OF AN ECONOMICAL AUTOMATIC TEMPERATURE AND TIME CONTROL MULTIPURPOSE DRYER

Many dryers exist in the open markets for drying several agricultural crops in Africa. Most of them have their limitations and complexities. The significant ones are expensive and cannot be afford by the peasant farmers. Those developed locally are inefficient especially where temperature control is required. There is need to develop appropriate systems that will ensure effective temperature control without compromising the quality parameters of products. Time control is also a challenge due to unstable power supply which result to calculation of drying time not the same as working hours of the dryer for existing dryers. A digital microprocessor base temperature control and time control dryer has been developed and fabricated for drying any type of biomaterial at varying temperature range using locally available materials. The fabricated temperature and time control multipurpose dryer was test to ascertain its performance, the preset temperature control the ON/OFF the heating helix in the drying chamber and the temperature control was compared with three different types of digital temperature meter. The time control was also tested to clock only when the dryer is powered.